The Transformation of Things

by Jillian Cantor

  Everything else had felt real, too, all the moments I’d been inside my friends’ heads, their bodies, their minds. And the moments when I hadn’t—the aftermath of these moments—Lisa taking too many pills, Kat drinking her chai tea, Will kissing me with passion.

  I paid for the magazines and walked back to the atrium to find Kelly. But the room was empty, so I walked back to the waiting room.

  When I got there, I saw Beverly holding on to Kelly, Beverly sobbing. I pulled Kelly away, and Beverly fell onto Stan. “What happened?” I asked.

  Kelly shook her head, as tears streamed down her face. She tried to speak, but she couldn’t. I hugged her, let her hold on to me, let her cry into my hair, until finally it was Stan who said it. “A stroke,” he whispered, as if the words didn’t make sense, even to him.

  Thirty-two

  Icalled Will to come pick me up because I felt too shaky to drive. My head was pounding, and I heard Stan’s words ringing in my head over and over again. This could not be real. This could not be happening. This had to be a dream.

  Will walked into the waiting room, and when I saw him, I ran to him, fell into his chest, felt his arms around me, smelled his pine smell. “Where’s Kelly?” he asked.

  “She already left with Beverly and Stan to go get the children.”

  “The children,” Will echoed, his voice thick with something I’d never heard from him before, a sense of loss and regret that came across much deeper than anything he’d felt after losing his career in law.

  “I don’t know how they’ll survive it,” I whispered to him, all the same knowing that they would have to, that Kelly and I had had to.

  “They will,” he said. “Children are resilient.”

  “This is why,” I whispered. “This is why I never wanted to have children.”

  He pulled back and looked confused, then mildly alarmed. “Dave?”

  I shook my head. “Parents die,” I said. “It’s not fair.” I started crying for the first time, sobbing into his shirt.

  “Jen, you’re not making any sense,” he said. But I was; it made perfect sense to me. Why bring someone, another person into the world, when we were all such imperfect beings, all riddled with disease or prone to accidents? Why make someone love you, someone young, someone helpless, when all of that love could be taken away? Just like that.

  “It wasn’t you, Will,” I said. “It was never you. You were never the reason why.”

  “No.” He shook his head, resolute. “It was. I was never home. I was never there for you.”

  “I never let you be,” I said softly. I could’ve told him not to run for judge. I could’ve said no to moving to Deerfield. It wasn’t really that I was scared he would resent me for it. No, I was afraid of something else altogether. I was afraid to let him get too close, to let him love me too much. Because then, when something happened to me, he’d be shattered, left with nothing.

  “Come on.” He held on to my arm and pulled me toward the door. “Let’s get you home.”

  Will had come in his Daniels and Sons truck, not even taking the time to get his own car after he’d gotten my call. His new devotion to me seemed astounding. “Here, let me help you up,” he said. I let him, his hands holding on to me feeling like the only thing holding me together.

  * * *

  When we got home, Will wanted to make me something to eat, but I was too tired to eat. This feeling of exhaustion overtook me, and all I could do, all I wanted to do was sleep. “You’re still tired?” Will said, unable to hide his disbelief.

  My whole body felt heavy, and my head ached. It was the way Lisa had felt, as if I were moving under water, trying so hard to push my way through something so thick, so heavy.

  “I’m worried about you,” Will said.

  “Dave is dead,” I said. The words sounded awful and so final when I heard them in my voice. “Just let me sleep.”

  I curled up under the covers, and I immediately felt myself drifting off.

  I was lying in the hospital bed. I saw the white walls, the TV hanging from the ceiling, the mirror over my sink. I heard someone, and I turned and saw Fat Ethel sitting by the bed. “You’re back,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You fell back into the coma.” She stood up. “Quite the anomaly you are. Keeping us all guessing.” She shook her head.

  “Coma?” I asked. “What happened? How did I get here?” I sat up too fast, and my head was killing me.

  “Whoa, slow down,” she said. “You remember that morning in the salon?” I nodded. “Jennifer, you had a stroke.” A stroke?

  “When you were getting your hair washed,” she said. I heard the water, rushing, rushing in my ears, the way it had that morning in the salon. “It happens sometimes if the neck is overextended, a blood vessel can burst. It’s called a beauty parlor stroke.”

  “But that was months ago,” I said.

  “Yes.” She nodded. “You’ve been in a coma since then.” She paused. “We weren’t sure if you were ever going to wake up. And then you did. And then you went back out again.”

  “Is this real?” I asked her. When she didn’t answer, I tried another question. “Where’s Will?”

  “I think he had to go to work.” Work. “But I think your sister is here.”

  As if on cue, there was a knock on the door, and Kelly stepped in. She saw me, and she smiled brightly. She looked different. Thinner. Her hair was much shorter, chin-length. “Oh thank God,” she said, glancing quickly at me, then at Fat Ethel.

  “I’ll be back to check on you,” Ethel said, and then it was just Kelly and me in the room.

  “How are you feeling?” Kelly asked. Her eyes, like saucers, gave her away. She was worried. Kelly reached up and smoothed back my hair, such a motherly gesture.

  “I’m still so tired,” I said. “Do you mind if I close my eyes?”

  “Just promise me you’ll wake up,” she said. “I need you.”

  When I woke up the next morning, it was snowing. I got out of bed and watched the flakes fall plump and gracefully from the sky like white-winged butterflies floating past our bedroom window. Will must’ve heard me get up, because I heard his footsteps behind me, felt his arms around my waist. He kissed the top of my head.

  “What if you hadn’t gotten indicted?” I whispered to him. “What do you think would’ve happened to us?”

  “I don’t know, Jen,” he said. “I honestly don’t know.” He paused. “But the job wasn’t the reason why we fell apart.”

  “I know,” I said, spinning around to face him. “It was my fault.”

  “It was both of us.” He touched my chin softly with his thumb.

  “I didn’t want you to get too attached. In case something happened to me.”

  “The lump was benign,” he said. “It didn’t mean anything.” He paused. “And even if it did, it wouldn’t have changed how I felt about you.”

  “Sometimes, I wondered,” I said out loud, for the very first time. “The way you proposed to me. If you really meant it, or if you just felt you needed to save me.”

  “I really loved you,” he said. “I really love you.”

  After Will went downstairs to make coffee, I walked into the computer room, sat down, and quickly Googled “strokes and hair salons.” Article after article came up, of something, a rare phenomenon, exactly what Fat Ethel had said in my dream, the beauty parlor stroke.

  I clicked on the first one and scanned through words: hyperextended neck, carotid artery tear, blood clot.

  It was a real thing, and how had I known that? I must’ve read an article about it before, I reasoned. As Ethel said, dreams were only our subconscious coming out, coming through. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t remember ever having heard that term before, beauty parlor stroke.

  I walked into the bathroom and turned the shower on, undressed, and stared at my naked body in the mirror.

  I am real, I thought. Right now, I am real.

  * *
*

  When I got to Kelly’s house, everyone was already there. Sharon answered the door and ushered me in, the absence of her chiding almost disconcerting, almost unreal. After a minute she said, “Thank God for the children.”

  “Why would you say that?” I frowned.

  “Well, because they’re a part of him. Without them he really would be gone forever.”

  I’d never thought of it that way before, that without me and Kelly, every single scrap of our mother would’ve evaporated into dust. I thought about what my father had said at the hospital, that I was a lot like her, and for the first time, I considered that something Sharon said might have had some merit.

  In Kelly’s living room, Beverly sat on the couch still wrapped in her fur stole, talking loudly on her cell phone to what seemed like Dave’s sister, Kathleen. My father sat opposite her on the love seat, while the kids sat on the floor, entranced, watching The Wiggles. “Where’s Stan?” I asked, but nobody answered me.

  I closed my eyes, and I saw the way his mouth had moved so slowly yesterday in the hospital waiting room. A stroke. A stroke.

  “Your sister’s upstairs,” Beverly said, when she hung up the phone.

  I found Kelly lying in her bed, in the dark. “Kel,” I whispered. “Are you okay?”

  “Jen,” she said. “You’re here.”

  “Of course I’m here.” I walked toward the bed and sat on the edge, next to her. The memory of the day our mother died flooded my brain, sudden and vivid and irrevocable: Kelly and I sitting on her bed after we knew she was gone; Kelly putting her arm around me and telling me that everything was going to be fine. I don’t believe you, I had said.

  I know, she’d whispered back. But we’ll have each other.

  Dave had walked into the room, sat down on the other side of her, hugged her, pulling her toward him, away from me. And that was the moment when I first understood I would never have more than a piece of her, that all I’d really have to rely on completely was myself. A thought that had utterly terrified me.

  “Jen,” she said now, “I can’t do this alone.”

  “I know,” I told her, knowing how hard it was, how I had felt alone for so long. “But you’re not alone,” I whispered. “You have me. We have each other.” I heard her voice in my dream, I need you.

  I lay down on the bed next to her, watching the ceiling for a while, staring at the way the fan stood still, listening to the rumble of the heat coming through the vents. I closed my eyes and wished I could take it all back, all the jealousy I’d had of her and Dave, all the moments I’d spent hating her just a little bit or fighting with her. Because now I knew, her happiness had nothing to do with mine; I had always been the one getting in my own way, keeping other people at a distance.

  The snow had started to accumulate as I left Kelly’s, but I knew I had to stop at Ethel’s, even though the roads were slippery. I hoped she would read my meridians right now, tell me what it was exactly. Maybe it was my liver, as Ethel had thought the other day, or maybe I had a brain tumor. That would explain it all, the crushing headaches, the dreams, the slippery grip I now felt I had on reality.

  “How’s your brother-in-law?” Ethel asked, as soon as I walked into her office. This time, it seemed she was expecting me, though I wasn’t supposed to come back until Friday.

  “He’s dead,” I said.

  Ethel nodded, a nod of resignation, as if it was something she already knew, as if she were a fortune teller, not an herbalist. I looked around the room and noticed right away that it was different, that the shelves were nearly empty, the herbs half packed into moving boxes scattered carelessly around the cement floor.

  “You’re moving?” I asked. She nodded. “You can’t move,” I said.

  “Lie down, Jennifer.” She pointed to her makeshift medical table.

  As I lay down, I said, “You can’t go. I need you.”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “We’re almost done here.”

  Ethel hooked up the machine, attaching the electrodes to different parts of my body, one at a time. My liver, my lungs, my kidneys, my heart, all came up clean. And then she checked my brain. “Ahh,” she said. “Here is the problem.”

  “What is it?” I asked, alarmed. “A tumor?”

  She shook her head. “Lie back,” she whispered. I did what she said, and I heard her rummaging around on the shelves, and in the boxes, clinking through bottles of herbs, until she found what she was looking for.

  “Will this help?” I asked her, as I felt her rubbing a foul-smelling tincture on my temples. “Will this help me know what’s real and what’s not?”

  “Jennifer,” she said. “Close your eyes.” She continued rubbing. I felt my body relax, the way it did before I took the calming herbs, before I was about to dream. “You know what is real,” she said. “You are in control of your own destiny.”No, that didn’t seem right. Not when there was so much out of our control.

  “Not death,” I said. “Not dying.”

  “Sometimes,” Ethel said softly, “you just have to choose to want to live. Choose it completely, with your mind, your body, your spirit.” She continued rubbing, and for the first time my headache began to subside. “Just embrace it,” she whispered, and for a brief moment it was not Ethel’s voice that I heard at all, but my mother’s, so soft and small and so uniquely hers. “You control your destiny. You control your destiny,” she said. “Just trust what your mind already knows. Trust it completely. You know what is real.”

  This is what I know is real: Will. I love Will.

  And that was the last thing I remembered thinking before the darkness.

  Thirty-three

  Iopened my eyes, and Will was standing there, by the window, watching the snow. He turned and smiled at me. “Good morning,” he said.

  A steady sense of relief washed over me as soon as I saw him. “Will,” I said, my voice croaking out, slowly, scratchily.

  He walked toward the bed, and he took my hand in his, brushing my knuckles lightly with his fingertips. “Good news,” he said. “You can go home soon.”

  “Home?” I echoed.

  “Ethel’s going to set you up with some physical therapy.”

  “Physical therapy?” I pictured Ethel rubbing my temples.

  “You’ll need to regain your strength,” he said. I looked around, saw the hospital rules for visitors on the door, and then I realized that was not the Ethel he meant. Your subconscious plays tricks on you. Everything is not what it seems. “But the doctors say you’ll be back to playing tennis by summer.”

  “Tennis.” I thought about Amber and Bethany applying their lipstick in the mirror, and I knew I never wanted to go back there, not even if they still wanted me. You are in control of your own destiny. That was not a life. That was not the life I wanted.

  He leaned closer. “Jen, there’s something I need to tell you.” I nodded. “Dave is dead,” I said, remembering the feeling of Kelly lying next to me on the bed. “Dave?” He frowned. “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He frowned again. “Dave is fine, but his father passed away a few days ago.”

  “Stan.” I pictured his face, the way it contorted as he said the word stroke. “Did he have another heart attack?”

  Will nodded. “You really could hear us. The doctors were right.”

  I wondered what else I heard, what was real and what wasn’t. “Will, who else was here besides you?”

  “Your sister, of course. And Kat and her girls, and Lisa came by a lot. Your dad and Sharon came by a few times, and Dr. Horowitz stopped by once. Oh, and so did Janice.”

  I thought about my father, about the way his voice had sounded when he told me I had my mother’s smile. Had I really heard him say this?

  “And of course Ethel. My goodness, she’s been a godsend, that woman.”

  I heard a knock at the door, and I looked up and saw Fat Ethel standing there. She walked in, breathing heavily as if the move from the door to the
bed was too much for her. She hugged Will, then leaned in and hugged me. “I just wanted to wish you luck,” she whispered in my ear.

  “Thank you,” I said, still feeling uneasy around this Ethel, the fake one who seemed astoundingly real to Will.

  “Namaste,” she said.

  I pulled back, startled for a moment, and then I said, “You know, I always wondered what that meant, namaste.”

  She leaned up and smiled. “It is a coming together,” she said. “Of mind, body, and spirit. A recognition of this in one another.”

  Choose it completely, with your mind, your body, your spirit, I heard the other Ethel saying.

  “That makes sense,” I said. “That makes perfect sense.”

  After Ethel left, I fell asleep. I didn’t dream, and when I woke up, it was dark, and I was still in the hospital bed. Will was sleeping in a blue vinyl chair, his mouth open, his neck askew. “Will,” I whispered into the darkness. “Will.”

  “Hmmm?” he murmured softly, smiling, even in his state of half sleep, as if he had been waiting for me to call to him forever.

  It occurred to me that the last thing he remembered, he knew of us, was our nonargument when I goaded him on about Janice’s baby. Thinking about our life, our relationship then, brought tears to my eyes. I thought for a moment that we’d gotten it all back, and yet what if none of that had been real?

  “Will,” I whispered louder.

  He opened his eyes. “What is it? Are you feeling okay?”

  I patted the space on the bed next to me, wanting him to get in beside me, wanting him to hold me, the way he had in what I was beginning to understand was only a dream world.

  He stood up and walked toward me, and he sat at the edge of the bed. I grabbed on to his hand, held it tightly. “I’ve had a lot of time to think or dream or something,” I whispered.He nodded. “I hate the way things were between us before. I don’t want to go back to that.”

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you earlier,” he said, leaning in closer, stroking my cheek with his hand. “I’m not a judge anymore.”